In Papua New Guinea, we were the attraction

As tourists, we were objects of curiosity for the colour of our skin

Roberto Rocha (right) and his girlfriend, Bianca Saia, are observed by villagers while they take part in a ceremonial sing-sing in the village of Tambul, Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.

Photograph by: Neoma Napasu
, for Postmedia News

"You're giving them stories to tell," my host and guide, Wako Napasu, told me as I shook the hands of village kids who had followed our Land Cruiser down a dirt road.

"They'll run home and say, 'Mommy, I touched a white man.' "

My girlfriend, Bianca, and I had just been spectators at a sing-sing, a tribal ceremony in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. We ended up there by serendipity, an impromptu stop as I took 14 months off my reporting job to travel the world. We would have gone straight from Australia to Indonesia, but two friendly PNG ladies we met in Fiji - and the foolish hope of a cannibal encounter - convinced us to make the extra hop.

At the sing-sing we watched men painted yellow, red and white dance in circles to thank a neighbouring tribe for repaying a pig loan. We saw an elder dressed only in a straw skirt and a fern crown start a fire with dried vine and some tree fibres.

It was all staged for our entertainment, of course. Such traditions only survive as tourist attractions and for the yearly cultural festival.

But something unusual happened in this cultural tour that we had paid for: the entire village of Tambul, a few hundred people living mostly in kerosene-lit huts, huddled around the performance green, not to watch the dancers, but to watch us: the white people they see mostly on TV.

PNG is truly the last frontier of independent travel. There is no infrastructure for budget backpackers like us. There are no roads from the coastal capital, Port Moresby, to take you up to the highlands. You have to fly with one of two domestic airlines, or if you're lucky enough, hitch a flight with a cargo turboprop or a missionary supply plane. Most visitors to the country are moneyed surfers, fishers, hikers or divers who stay at the handful of posh resorts and rarely venture out into public to avoid the savagery they've been taught to fear by reading their newspapers.

Result: wherever we went, we were quickly surrounded by an entourage of children that would make Brangelina envious. They would stare with the kind of awe that I, at their age, would reserve for man-eating zoo creatures.

Those scores of eyeballs filled me with an intense pressure to portray my ethnic difference in a favourable light, and most of all, to not say anything embarrassingly stupid.

The Melanesian culture quickly shows you how silly this is. Whatever I did, the locals smiled. Anything I muttered in Pidgin, the lingua franca of this nation of 800 languages, would send the kids into hysterical guffaws. What amuses these friendly people, who 60 years ago were hunting with spears, is so disarmingly simple that it made me wonder if maybe my life has got a touch too complicated.

The folks from PNG have such little contact with Westerners that they have plenty of time to idealize them. Most of them are subsistence farmers, and a century of missionary work hasn't erased millennia of warrior-based societies. Educated adults speak English, but that doesn't mean communication is any easier with such a broad chasm of experience between us.

"Why do you admire white people so much?" I asked Joyce Napasu, my guide Wako's wife, who took care of our every need in the highlands.

"You live in nice houses, use good toilets, are very clean. We black people are always poor," she said. It little matters that it was whites who came uninvited to their land and told them that their millennial traditions would damn them to an eternity of suffering. Or that whites were reaping big profits from newly discovered liquid natural gas reserves.

I could have said lots of things that might have undone some of the harmful programming her people had endured, acting as a kind of anti-colonizer. But then I would only be following past follies, playing the civilized squatter who tells the locals how they should live.

Wako's family makes a decent living entertaining a few tourists each year, and lives in one of the biggest houses in Mount Hagen. They have a fridge, but it's never plugged in, as highlanders eat whatever they harvest that day. They have a dining table, but it's always covered with a protective canvas with the chairs resting on top.

At dinnertime one night, Joyce placed plates on the table for us, while the rest of her family ate on the kitchen floor, as they do at every meal. We promptly joined them and hoped that this would, even if just a little bit, contract the skin-pigment gap that they have grown up with.

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